FALLS CHURCH, Va. -- The caller, Thomas Heidenberger, had lost his wife on the Sept. 11 flight that crashed into the Pentagon. He was asking for a little of the half-billion dollars the Red Cross has collected for people like him. After weeks of inquiry, he was fed up.

On the other end of the phone line was Beth Jacobs, a 54-year-old volunteer from Kansas City, Mo. Ms. Jacobs sat in the Red Cross's Emergency Gift Center, a set of improvised phone banks in a former Levitz furniture store outside Washington, D.C. There,...